This invention relates to trading systems particularly financial trading systems.
Electronic equity markets, such as The Nasdaq Stock Market® collect, aggregate, display pre-trade information to market participants. Electronic equity markets also provide trading platforms through which market participants may access liquidity indicated in the marketplace. In some types of markets customer orders are entered by broker/dealers or equivalents and traded against other orders or quotes that are displayed by market makers or electronic commerce networks (ECN's). Sometimes orders are for what is commonly referred to as an odd lot, e.g., an order that is not a multiple of 100 shares.
One type of trading platform is the Small Order Execution System (SOESSM). The Small Order Execution System can be used to access, e.g., market makers quotes, via automatic execution if the order is for a public customer and meets a maximum order size requirement. Conventionally, in systems such as the Small Order Execution System (SOESSM) odd lots are processed against only those market makers who are at the inside bid or offer, in round-robin fashion. An odd-lot execution does not decrement or decrease a market maker's quote by the amount of the execution.